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DeWitt: New monument should repudiate county's racial history

 
Paul Douglas has questions to resolve about the monument.
Paul Douglas has questions to resolve about the monument.
Published Dec. 10, 2015

The plan is as vague as it ambitious, as underfunded as it is well-intentioned.

At the request of Paul Douglas, president of the Hernando County branch of the NAACP, the County Commission on Tuesday set aside land at the Hernando County Government Center for a monument to African-Americans.

What will it look like? Douglas can only say he intends to hold a design contest.

How is he going to pay for it? He has commitments from businesses and individuals, he said. But he didn't say which ones or how much they are willing to give.

Who will raise this money and put up the monument? It won't be the NAACP, Douglas said, but a group formed strictly for this project. For now, though, he doesn't know who will be included or what it will be called.

Finally, what's the monument supposed to say to the community and visitors about the history of African-Americans in Hernando? What is its message?

That's not really clear, either, even though it is the main question Douglas needs to answer.

Remember, this all started nearly six months ago, after Dylann Roof allegedly shot and killed nine innocent congregants at a historic African-American church in Charleston, S.C.

Even in that hidebound state, it was an easy call to remove the Confederate battle flag from the lawn of the statehouse.

Hernando, on the other hand, faced a weightier issue. Really weighty. Its flag is etched in the base of another, larger, granite-and-marble monument to racial oppression — the statue of a Confederate soldier on the lawn of the Hernando County Courthouse.

Douglas wanted it gone. So did Commissioner Diane Rowden. Cart it away, she said. Take it to a museum. Don't leave it where it is — a place that, along with the liriope planted lovingly at its base and the floodlight that reverently shines on it at night, implies public endorsement.

But then, Rowden said, she talked to community leaders, including the pastors of black churches. They didn't want to get rid of the Confederate statue. They want space to tell their own story. They want a chance to talk about accomplishments of Hernando's black residents.

Fine. But something tells me that if it's palatable to corporate donors and community leaders leery of making waves, it's not going to do what it needs to do.

It's not going to formally and definitively repudiate the message of the statue.

This edifice not only glorifies a slave-holding government; it was put up 51 years after the fall of that government by people who were holding on to its values as tightly they could and for as long as possible.

Less than a decade later, Ku Klux Klan rallies drew the largest crowds ever to assemble in downtown Brooksville, newspapers said at the time.

Some of these folks, no doubt, were in the mobs that gave Hernando one of the highest rates of lynchings of counties in the nation.

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White supremacy enforced by terror. Basically, in that era, the way of Dylann Roof was the way of our community.

And we still celebrate this legacy on our courthouse lawn.

If we don't remove the statue, we need some display that memorializes the victims of this violence and makes it clear that we recognize its shame.

Any other plan misses the point.

Contact Dan DeWitt at ddewitt@tampabay.com; follow @ddewitttimes.